Hi Axelle! This is really great timing—I’ve recently been looking into a closely related project.
I don’t have access to the Bloomberg article, but keen to hear your thoughts on some of the data Aviagen has published on their welfare selection program, in particular this report. I was (perhaps naively) given the impression that broiler welfare was actually improving quite fast, e.g. the leg defect rate of the Ross 308 halving from 6% to 3% over the past 10 years, according to Fig 10.
If true, that’s ~1bn chickens each year no longer suffering from leg defects!
There’s also this paper (also published by Aviagen) that suggests about 30% of their selection focus is on health and welfare traits (Fig 3). Is this misleading?
The project I’m looking into would essentially be working with Aviagen/Cobb to speed up their welfare selection programme through better measurement technology / whatever their current bottlenecks turn out to be. The feasibility of that very much depends on their willingness to cooperate though.
Hi Axelle! This is really great timing—I’ve recently been looking into a closely related project.
I don’t have access to the Bloomberg article, but keen to hear your thoughts on some of the data Aviagen has published on their welfare selection program, in particular this report. I was (perhaps naively) given the impression that broiler welfare was actually improving quite fast, e.g. the leg defect rate of the Ross 308 halving from 6% to 3% over the past 10 years, according to Fig 10.
If true, that’s ~1bn chickens each year no longer suffering from leg defects!
There’s also this paper (also published by Aviagen) that suggests about 30% of their selection focus is on health and welfare traits (Fig 3). Is this misleading?
The project I’m looking into would essentially be working with Aviagen/Cobb to speed up their welfare selection programme through better measurement technology / whatever their current bottlenecks turn out to be. The feasibility of that very much depends on their willingness to cooperate though.
Keen to discuss this more!